The Prime Minister, David Cameron, has told the White House that he intends to stand shoulder to shoulder with President Obama as the United States steps up its global hunt for leading jihadists.
It is understood that the Prime Minister has given his approval for the elite British troops to be used beyond Afghanistan in order to "decapitate" the al-Qaeda leadership.
Britain already has counter-terrorist teams located in the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan and in Yemen, where they are responsible for training indigenous troops in counter-insurgency, counter-IED and counter-intelligence techniques.
Defence sources have said that the hunt for leading jihadists, such as Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda's second-in-command, and Mullah Omar, the former Taliban leader, will continue in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.
The SAS are already working closely with the US Special Forces in Afghanistan where they have spent the last year conducting hundreds of search and destroy operations in a bid to break the back of the Taliban. In the past nine months more than 1,000 Taliban and al-Qaeda "high value targets" have been killed or captured by the multinational special operations task force.
General David Petraeus, who will take over as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency in June, developed a deep affection for the SAS when he was the coalition commander in Iraq. He often praised the role and success of Task Force Black, the counter-terrorist task forces composed of the SAS and US Delta Force commandos. Gen Petraeus also worked closely with British special forces commanders when he took over control of Nato operations in Afghanistan and sanctioned the approval of the search and destroy operations which are believed to have severely weakened the Taliban.
But a senior officer warned that despite the death of al-Qaeda's leader, the terrorist organisation will still remain a potent threat for years to come. He said: "Al-Qaeda has lost momentum, and the death of bin Laden will only make it more difficult for the organisation to conduct attacks. It will hard for al-Qaeda to find another iconic figure but despite this we should avoid talk of 'winning'.
"This is a useful military event which should be used to help deter the threat. It demonstrates the reach and persistence of the US government to achieve justice. But, overall, I believe this is a case of 'situation, no change'. This was a significant event during a long campaign."
But it is understood that the US and British special forces could also be deployed to conduct strike operations in Yemen.
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#1
The movement was there before UBL, and will still be there. It would be nice to put the military arm of this hydra into disarray, but the movement itself needs to be discredited and to subsequently evaporate over time.
For that to happen, a few key spiritual leaders will have to be caught in a compromisins situation. Perhaps with a male goat. Some imams will need to just disappear or maybe get incurable cancer or something.
Or we could just drill and end our dependence on foreign oil.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
